Just One Day by Gayle Forman (review)

Allyson is the only child of a mother who compensates for her own disappointments by over-scheduling and micromanaging every aspect of Allyson’s life. Even Allyson’s post-graduation trip to Europe is a crushing disappointment until her longtime best friend encourages her to go off the tour, whereupon Allyson meets Willem, an enigmatic Dutch Shakespearean actor. On a whim, she and Willem go to Paris for one perfect day, during which she discovers another side to herself and falls in love. Sadly, after amazing sex with Willem in an empty art squat, she awakens to find him gone and scurries back to her role as passive good girl. Her glimpse of what she could be has left her seriously depressed, however, and after a disastrous first semester in college, she decides that she has to make some changes, which include going back to Paris to try to track Willem down and find out what happened. Armchair travelers and romance fans suffering under the oppressive regimes of helicopter parents, or those merely plagued by existential boredom, will definitely relate to Allyson’s quest as she struggles to replace Hamlet’s question of “to be or not to be” with her more urgent one of “how to be.” Supported by a theatrical friend whom she meets in a Shakespeare class, she contemplates how the various roles we play relate to who we ultimately become. Eventually, she realizes that her return to Paris is not a search for Willem so much as it is a search for herself, and therein lies the real romance. Willem, though, has a lot of explaining to do, and the unanswered questions will whet readers’ appetites for the promised companion novel.